]]>We visit Oasis of Peace, a small village in Israel where Jews, Muslims and Christians intentionally live together and promote a message that peace is possible. “I’d like people to know that there are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to, trying to live together,” says Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Jerusalem.
/wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/09/thumb01-neveshalom.jpg“There are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to live together,” says Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Jerusalem.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2013/08/02/september-23-2011-interfaith-village-in-israel/9578/feed/5Christians,discrimination,Education,Ethnic violence,Interfaith Dialogue,Israel,Jews,Middle East,Muslims,Neve Shalom,Palestine,Peace Process"I’d like people to know that there are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to, trying to live together," says Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in J..."I’d like people to know that there are a lot of people in this country who are into dialogue, education, getting to know one another, trying to, trying to live together," says Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Jerusalem.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno7:58 Lambeth Holy Land Conferencehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/07/22/july-22-2011-lambeth-holy-land-conference/9172/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/07/22/july-22-2011-lambeth-holy-land-conference/9172/#commentsFri, 22 Jul 2011 22:45:42 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=9172More →

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Top Roman Catholic and Anglican leaders from around the world this week launched a new effort to support Christians in the Holy Land who are caught in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. They also called on politicians to jump-start the stalled Middle East peace process. The new campaign got underway at a high-level meeting in London. Kim Lawton was there.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: Christian leaders from Europe, North America, and the Middle East gathered at the historic Lambeth Palace, residence of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The meeting was co-hosted by Williams and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols.

ARCHBISHOP ROWAN WILLIAMS, Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury: We cannot wait for the politicians to sort it out before we as civil society, as active agents, as people of faith, get on with making the differences we can make.

LAWTON: A main focus was how to shore up the minority Christian community in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Because of emigration and low birth rates, Christians now make up less than two percent of the population there.

WILLIAMS: That’s the very specific and the very practical challenge: Have these people a future in their ancestral home? We hope and pray that they do.

ARCHBISHOP VINCENT NICHOLS, Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales: The Holy Land and the holy sites could become something like the Colosseum, you know, the remnants of something that is of great historical interest and maybe of cultural interest, but not lived in, not living and breathing centers of life and prayer.

LAWTON: The leaders discussed concrete ways to help the predominantly Palestinian Christian community, such as financial support, building more relationships between congregations, and increasing public policy advocacy. As part of that, the group specifically called for an end to security restrictions that prevent local people of faith from visiting their holy sites. Conference organizers denied criticism from some quarters that supporting Palestinian Christians makes one “anti-Israel.”

NICHOLS: What we want to be in being pro-Christian is also being pro-Israeli and pro-peace.

LAWTON: The group heard from a variety of voices, including Jews and Muslims. Participants all agreed that working for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be the biggest help of all.

BISHOP GERALD KICANAS, Catholic Diocese of Tucson: Ultimately, what we need is a two-state solution where these two peoples can live together in peace, each in their own sovereign states, respecting the boundaries and respecting the rights of those states. But we’re not there yet.

LAWTON: The leaders said the conversation was valuable. But, as always, the big challenge will be turning talk into action.

I’m Kim Lawton at Lambeth Palace in London.

ABERNETHY: Kim will have a special report from the Holy Land next week.

At a meeting in London’s historic Lambeth Palace, top Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders launched a new effort to support Christians in the Holy Land. “Have these people a future in their ancestral home? We hope and pray that they do,” says Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams./wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/07/thumb01-lambeth.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/07/22/july-22-2011-lambeth-holy-land-conference/9172/feed/0Archbishop of Canterbury,Archbishop of Westminster,Christians,Holy Land,Interfaith,Israel,Lambeth,Middle East,Palestinians,Peace Process,Rowan Williams,Vincent NicholsAt a meeting in London’s historic Lambeth Palace, top Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders launched a new effort to support Christians in the Holy Land. “Have these people a future in their ancestral home? We hope and pray that they do,At a meeting in London’s historic Lambeth Palace, top Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders launched a new effort to support Christians in the Holy Land. “Have these people a future in their ancestral home? We hope and pray that they do,” says Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno2:26 James Carroll on Jerusalemhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/05/13/may-13-2011-james-carroll-on-jerusalem/8805/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/05/13/may-13-2011-james-carroll-on-jerusalem/8805/#commentsFri, 13 May 2011 19:29:42 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=8805More →

JAMES CARROLL (Author, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World”): Jerusalem in the ancient world was the cockpit of violence. It was the place where all the warring armies of the empires intersected.

Beginning with that first experience of exile in Babylon, Jews came into a new awareness of who they were and who their God was by looking back at Jerusalem, and they claim their identity by refusing to forget it.

Augustine was arguing for the survival of Jews as Jews in Christendom who would witness to the truth of Christian claims by their degradation, and that’s been the source of tremendous anti-Jewish and ultimately anti-Semitic behavior, contempt, and one of the most powerful forms of the degradation was the Jews are to be permanently in exile from Jerusalem, from the Jewish home.

It’s so important to emphasize that the Islamic arrival in Jerusalem was nonviolent and respectful of the Jewish tradition, so that when the caliph beheld the Temple Mount, which to him was to be revered because that was the place where God had stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son, he’s astounded to discover that the Christians have been treating it as a garbage dump, and the caliph, Umar, ordered the Temple Mount cleaned up, reverenced; he invited Jews back into the city who had been exiled by the Christians. Those first generations of Muslims were honoring the Jewish holy place without any sense of conflict with it, and we know that that was lost.

In the year 1096 when the pope calls for the crusade to take Jerusalem back from the infidel who have been occupying it since the seventh century, it sears the European Christian imagination with violence, holy war, God wills violence, and it centers the Christian imagination on—guess what?—Jerusalem.

The return of the Jewish people to Jerusalem, to Israel, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries especially, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, is a reversal of this ancient fate that was generated by the Romans and then theologized by the Christians. And I would just add that we Christians have been reckoning with this, and that’s the meaning for us Catholics of the tremendously important visit to Jerusalem by Pope John Paul II in the year 2000. He prayed at the Western Wall as a Jew would pray, without invoking Jesus, and he offered his act of repentance there—a tremendously important reversal of theology, the example of the kind of reckoning with the past that has to keep happening, actually.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have a sacred connection to it, each in a very different way. That sacred connection to this place, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.

I don’t see any hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians until two things happen. One, Palestinians have to somehow reckon with the authentic return of the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland is a fulfillment of Jewish history. On the other side, I don’t see much hope for peace until Israelis reckon with their part in the dispossession of the Palestinian people, and in particular I’m troubled by the settlements and the ongoing occupation.

The holy one we all have in common is the one God, which makes us brothers and sisters, so the place itself is a source of peace, and so I love Jerusalem, including the mess of it—the Christian mess, certainly, but all of the messes of it.

EXCERPT: JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM

“The Most Absolute of Cities”

To speak of the hope of peace for Jerusalem is to acknowledge the enormous varieties of religious experience, to use the great phrase of William James, which in the twenty-first century face each other in the intimacy of the global village. Jerusalem is that village writ small, a living image of how all believers and nonbelievers inevitably encounter—or confront—one another as near neighbors, unable to avoid each other’s differences, and therefore unable not to be influenced by them. Jerusalem has long been the most absolute of cities, yet it is the capital today of encounters in which absolutisms are shown to be mutually interdependent, and therefore not absolute. Neither values nor revelations exist outside of history, and if Jerusalem does not show that, nothing does. Yet Jerusalem also shows how each religion that finds a home there, including “the religion of no religion,” understands itself as offering a comprehensive vision of the whole of reality, even if it does so from the necessarily partial perspective of its contingent tradition. The religions, while emphasizing the whole to which their revelation points, have tended to forget the inevitable partiality that arises from the basic fact of the human condition, that truth is always perceived from one point of view or another—never in itself.

That is what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel meant when he declared that “God is greater than religion.” Every religion. That might seem a modern insight, yet it encapsulates the breakthrough vision that the captive Jews were given in Babylon nearly three millennia ago, the vision that made Judaism the first of the three monotheisms. Those religions, like every religion, came into being with an inbuilt tendency to confuse themselves with the object of their devotion, as if the worshiped deity were the religion. Religious orthodoxies of every kind tend to forget that at their center is an unknown mystery—unknown because unknowable. “So what are we to say about God?” Augustine asked. “If you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God.” Humans are restless in the face of what they cannot know, which is why the essential unknowability of God has prompted humans to make gods out of what we can and do know. Our selves, tribes, nations—and doctrinal beliefs. When religions substitute themselves for God, as they have done from the time of Jeremiah to the time of crusading popes to the time of fatwa-issuing ayatollahs, they become igniters of sacred violence, which, with its transcendent claims, can be more enflaming than any other fire, any fever.

The connection between religion and violence has been powerfully laid bare in the twenty-first century. How will its exposure shape the next generation of believers?

From “Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World” by James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/05/thumb01-carrolljerusalem.jpgChristians, Jews, and Muslims have a sacred connection to the city of Jerusalem, says author James Carroll, and “that sacred connection, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.”

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/05/13/may-13-2011-james-carroll-on-jerusalem/8805/feed/2anti-Semitism,Christians,Crusades,Israel,Israeli settlements,James Carroll,Jerusalem,Jewish,Muslims,occupation,Palestinians,Pope John Paul IIChristians, Jews, and Muslims all have a sacred connection to the ancient city of Jerusalem, says author James Carroll, and “that sacred connection, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.”Christians, Jews, and Muslims all have a sacred connection to the ancient city of Jerusalem, says author James Carroll, and “that sacred connection, even though at the present moment it’s a source of contention, is actually a profound source of union.”Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno3:59Imam Feisal Rauf: Faith Communities in Post-Mubarak Egypthttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/03/02/imam-feisal-rauf-faith-communities-in-post-mubarak-egypt/8279/
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/wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/03/thumb-rauf-postmubarak.jpgImam Feisal Rauf of New York City was in Washington this week and spoke with us about religion’s positive potential in a post-Mubarak Egypt.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile now of a man who has spent most of his life working for better relations between Christians and Jews. He is Rabbi James Rudin, for many years until his retirement the head of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. Rudin has a new book out called “Christians and Jews, Faith to Faith.” One reason he wrote it, he says, is his fear that the cause he has served so long is losing momentum.

We met Rudin at a retreat center near his home in Florida. Once, he promoted better interreligious understanding with top US and foreign leaders. He had 11 meetings with Pope John Paul II and then with Benedict XVI. Rudin may be retired officially, but he is still busy writing, speaking, and leading interfaith meetings, this one of Catholics and Jews.

RABBI JAMES RUDIN (speaking at interfaith meeting): Is it possible to be a faithful Catholic and a faithful Jew, very deep in your soul, in your heart, and still have mutual respect and understanding for the Other, capital O, the Other who is not of our faith?

ABERNETHY: Rudin says the Nazi Holocaust of the 1930s and ’40s taught his generation what can happen when bigotry goes unchecked.

RUDIN: To me it’s a pathology, it’s a cancer—that is anti-Semitism or any religious hatred—and if you don’t treat it, if you don’t treat it as a pathology, it can fester and can be quiet for a while, and then it explodes.

ABERNETHY: Pope John Paul II, along with many others, led the postwar attack on religious prejudice, especially on anti-Semitism. In the year 2000, John Paul prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. The note he left asked God’s forgiveness for all those who had caused Jews to suffer. I asked Rudin if he blames Christians for the Holocaust.

RUDIN: I don’t hold today’s Christians guilty, not at all. Most of them were born after ’45. But there is a responsibility to teach it to young Christians growing up today. In Christian Europe, in a Christian society mass murder took place of a religious community, and how did that happen?

ABERNETHY: In churches, synagogues, and schools, often with carefully prepared courses and videos, dialogues explore the issues that separate the two religions, one of them—the words “Old Testament.”

RUDIN: It’s not accurate because it puts Judaism as if it were something old-fashioned, not up to date or, as many Christians believe, has been replaced by Christianity and that the New Testament is superior to the Old Testament, and that’s my beef with it.

ABERNETHY: And what about the understanding many Christians have that the Hebrew Bible foreshadows the coming of Christ?

RUDIN: I want Christians to take the Hebrew Bible or, it’s called, the Old Testament or the Tanakh on its own terms. Do not imply that it was written six- or seven-hundred years before an event and was already predicting an event.

ABERNETHY: What then should evangelical Christians and others do about their conviction that the whole Bible is literally true—God’s word?

RUDIN: Well, that’s not the way Jews and other Christians read the Bible.

ABERNETHY: And the ancient accusation that Jews killed Christ?

RUDIN: That’s one of the most insidious and odious charges, and everybody knows, or everybody should know that Jews under Roman occupation in the land of Israel at that time had no power to execute anybody.

ABERNETHY: Another issue—Jesus’ “Great Commission” to his followers to make disciples of all nations.

RUDIN: Well, I respect that and I understand it, but Jews are already with the Father, already with God—the Covenant—and are not in need of any intermediary.

ABERNETHY: And attitudes toward Israel? I asked Rudin whether he thinks some Jews are so supportive of the state of Israel that they can’t criticize its government’s policies.

RUDIN: There are many Jews who are very unhappy with the various policies of the Israeli government and have expressed it. However, there is one thing that the overwhelming number of Jews agree—that Israel must survive as a Jewish state.

ABERNETHY: Rudin says the best results from interfaith dialogue come when participants honestly identify their differences as well as common ground.

RUDIN: I’ve found after 40 years of this that Jews and Christians who really engage one another come out better Christians and better Jews.

ABERNETHY: Rudin preaches a theology that accepts the validity of all religions, all different approaches to the transcendent.

RUDIN: I really believe that God’s plan for the human family is that there are many, many paths to God, and there’s not just one path and one way and one truth, and that’s the hardest thing for Christians and Jews to accept. They can accept neighbors, they can accept working together, marrying one another, they can do all kinds of things, but when push comes to shove they’ll say “my faith is the truth,.” But when you say “my faith is the truth” you are excluding 98 percent of the rest of the world.

ABERNETHY: The interfaith group Rudin spoke to was the board of directors of the Center for Christian-Jewish Studies at Florida’s Saint Leo University. Some of the members spoke of the progress they have seen:

INTERFAITH MEETING PARTICIPANT: I go back to my own childhood, where my schoolmates would call me a dirty Jew, and now I have a beloved Catholic son-in-law, and we’re sitting in this group. It’s like day and night.

RUDIN: That’s in one generation

INTERFAITH MEETING PARTICIPANT: In one generation—well, a long one.

ABERNETHY: Others emphasized their concern for the future.

INTERFAITH MEETING PARTICIPANT: My fear is that we have peaked. Now if I’m wrong in this tell me, because a lot of the folks that are engaged in our work here are not necessarily going to be around the next 10 years. The challenge for us is how to bring folks who aren’t 60 years old into this game, right?

ABERNETHY: Rabbi Rudin, too, sees work left to do and not enough younger people interested in doing it.

RUDIN: I think the initial enthusiasm, the first flush of excitement—gee, Christians and Jews meeting together in America and dialogue or in Israel or Europe either—that’s over. And you have a whole new generation of Jews and Christians for whom all this either seems old-fashioned or unnecessary or the job has been done. There’s nothing more to do. Maybe they think we’ve succeeded, but we haven’t.

ABERNETHY: If younger generations feel better relations between Christians and Jews are no longer a top priority, surely one of the reasons is the great improvement in those relations that Rabbi Rudin helped bring about.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2011/02/thumb02-rabbirudin.jpg“You have a whole new generation of Jews and Christians for whom all this either seems old-fashioned or unnecessary or the job has been done. Maybe they think we’ve succeeded, but we haven’t,” says one interreligious affairs leader.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2011/02/25/february-25-2011-rabbi-james-rudin/8226/feed/3Catholic,Christians,dialogue,Faith,Interfaith,Interreligious,Jewish,Jews,Rabbi James Rudin"You have a whole new generation of Jews and Christians for whom all this either seems old-fashioned or unnecessary or the job has been done. There’s nothing more to do. Maybe they think we’ve succeeded, but we haven’t,"You have a whole new generation of Jews and Christians for whom all this either seems old-fashioned or unnecessary or the job has been done. There’s nothing more to do. Maybe they think we’ve succeeded, but we haven’t," says one interreligious affairs leader.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno7:27 Disappearing Christians of Iraqhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/24/november-26-2010-disappearing-christians-of-iraq/7568/
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KATE SEELYE (correspondent): In a church in the Iraqi village of Qaraqosh, a priest prepares for a communal baptism. With a splash of water, he welcomes these infants into the Christian faith.

It’s a challenging time for Iraq’s Christians. Since the 2003 American invasion, the Christian community has been threatened and persecuted. Everyone is a target, including Father Mazen Ishou Mitoka. His church in the city of Mosul has been bombed three times. He himself was kidnapped and held for nine days. But the real horror took place last February when his parents responded to a knock at their Mosul home.

FATHER MAZEN ISHOU MITOKA: My father opened the door and saw three armed people. They entered the house and my brother tried to resist them but he had no weapons. We don’t keep weapons at home.

SEELYE: The intruders asked for an identity card to confirm that the family was Christian. They then shot and killed the priest’s father and two brothers. Father Mazin says the killings make no sense to him.

MITOKA: Are they political or sectarian? Is this part of some plan to get rid of the Christians? There is always a question mark. Nobody claims the assassinations.

SEELYE: Iraq’s Christians are one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Most belong to the Chaldean Catholic Church. Others are Assyrian, affiliated with the Church of the East, or Syriac Orthodox. While they all speak Arabic, their native tongue is Aramaic, the language of Christ. At the time of Saddam’s overthrow, there were estimated to be up to one million Christians in Iraq. Today their numbers have diminished by more than a third as Christians have fled a wave of violence, unleashed by the US invasion.

Siham and Linda Basheer are widows. Their husbands, a father and son, were killed in 2008. The men were shot within two weeks of each other in Mosul by unidentified gunmen. The widows blame the violence on growing Muslim extremism and intolerance, which they say didn’t exist before the US invasion.

LINDA BASHEER: During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan we sent food and well wishes to the Muslims. Muslims visited Christians, Christians visited Muslims. We all got along. But after the collapse of Saddam, everything changed.

SEELYE: In the past, they say, Iraq’s Christians were an accepted and integral part of Iraqi society. Their contributions were significant, adds Basile Georges Casmoussa, the Syriac Archbishop of Mosul.

BASILE GEORGES CASMOUSSA: In the 1950s, the dozens of doctors in Mosul were all Christian. Christians opened the first schools, the first publishing house, the first theater, the first hospital.

SEELYE: Most importantly, he adds, Christians were secure and protected under Saddam Hussein’s government, but the arrival of American troops put the community in a difficult position, adds Casmoussa.

CASMOUSSA: The Christians suffered from the advent of the Americans because our Muslim brothers assumed that because they were Christians and we were Christians, we must be allies. So we had to defend ourselves against that.

SEELYE: Christians were not a part of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam, unlike most Kurds and Shia Muslims. But once he was overthrown, many Christians took jobs with the American army. As law and order dissolved in the new Iraq, extremists filled the void. They accused Christians of being traitors, attacking their churches and businesses, and demanded that they convert to Islam. Without a militia to protect them, Iraq’s Christian community started to flee.

Some came here, to this largely Christian village of Qaraqosh, where security is tight. Qaraqosh is located in the Nineveh Plains, just north of Mosul in the northern part of Iraq.

Because it’s so secure, Qaraqosh has largely been spared the violence plaguing big cities like Mosul and Baghdad. Since 2005, nearly ten thousand Christians have fled here. This hastily erected compound houses hundreds of refugees, like the Basheers, who say they are just scraping by.

BASHEER: The government has never given us anything but there are a few humanitarian organizations which sometimes give us food, clothes and money.

SEELYE: But the vast majority of Christians refugees have fled Iraq altogether and are living in neighboring countries like Jordan and Syria.

Christian leaders here are now debating how to keep the remaining members of their community from leaving. Some hope a new election law giving Christians a minimum of five seats in Iraq’s parliament will increase their influence. Other leaders have been talking about establishing a so-called “safe zone” for Christians in the Nineveh Plains. But Lois Marcos, a local council member in Qaraqosh, says it’s a bad idea.

LOIS MARCOS: An autonomous zone would be a risky solution for the Christians because many other groups oppose it and if the Christians bring this issue up again there will be more threats and killings and migrations.

SEELYE: Instead, Marcos says, he would welcome U.S and foreign aid to create jobs here, as well as to establish local police units, manned by Christians. He says better local security is critical, especially given a growing dispute in the Nineveh Plains between Arabs and Kurds, a separate ethnic group.

Marcos says the Kurds, who run a semi-autonomous region to the north, lay claim to parts of Nineveh, even though its under the jurisdiction of Iraq’s central government.

MARCOS: We live in an area that is disputed. We have our brothers the Kurds to the north, and to the south, our brothers the Arabs. In Nineveh, we are stuck in the middle, caught between a rock and a hard place.

SEELYE: Mayor Bassem Bello is from another Christian village in the Nineveh Plains. He says the American army has served as a buffer between feuding Arab and Kurdish forces, but now, he fears, Christians will suffer even more after US forces start to leave Iraq at the end of the summer.

BASSEM BELLO: There is an Arab-Kurd conflict that exists in Iraq, nobody admits it. We minorities will be the victims of this conflict and this area will be a war zone.

SEELYE: Lawyer Hani Andrews says given all the pressures his community faces, Christians see no future for themselves in Iraq.

HANI ANDREWS: Every Assyrian Christian single man or woman wants to leave the country, if they get this chance, yes in general. If now, for example, if the United States administration declares that we are ready to give visas, U.S. visas to go to the United States for Christians in Iraq, I think at least 80 percent of what we have left of our population will leave the country to the United States.

SEELYE: And what will that mean for the Christian community?

ANDREWS: We are persecuted. We are, we have been killed every day.

SEELYE: But what will that mean for the numbers of Christians in Iraq? Will there be any Christians left?

ANDERWS: No, of course. The population is rapidly decreasing. Most of them want to flee.

SEELYE: Hani adds that the disappearance of Iraq’s Christians would not be unprecedented. He points to neighboring Turkey, where a once flourishing Christian community is now virtually nonexistent. He says Christians in places like Egypt and Palestine are also leaving due to political pressures.

ANDREWS: If these superpowers will stay ignoring what happening in the Middle East, I think maybe in the next 50 or 70 years the Middle East will be empty from Christianity.

SEELYE: For Iraq’s Christian community, which traces its roots as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, it’s a bitter prospect. But the only real guarantee for its safety is a secure, stable, and democratic Iraq. With Baghdad’s politicians still fighting over forming a new government and American troops soon scheduled to leave, a stable Iraq seems to many Christians like a dream.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/24/november-26-2010-disappearing-christians-of-iraq/7568/feed/4Assyrian,Catholic,Chaldean,Christianity,Christians,Iraq,Iraq War,Iraqi refugees,Kurds,Mosul,Muslim,OrthodoxMany thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled a wave of violence that was unleashed in 2003 by the US invasion.Many thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled a wave of violence that was unleashed in 2003 by the US invasion.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno8:37 Pamela Greenberg Extended Interviewhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/24/november-26-2010-pamela-greenberg-extended-interview/7554/
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Watch more of producer Susan Goldstein’s interview about the psalms with poet and writer Pamela Greenberg, whose new book, The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation (Bloomsbury, 2010), is being praised for its literary beauty.

Watch more of producer Susan Goldstein’s interview with writer Pamela Greenberg, whose new translation of the Book of Psalms is being praised for its literary beauty./wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/07/thumb-completepsalms.jpg

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/11/24/november-26-2010-pamela-greenberg-extended-interview/7554/feed/0anger,Bible,Christians,depression,Faith,fear,God,Hebrew,Jewish,Jews,joy,justiceWatch more of producer Susan Goldstein's interview with writer Pamela Greenberg, whose new translation of the Book of Psalms is being praised for its literary beauty.Watch more of producer Susan Goldstein's interview with writer Pamela Greenberg, whose new translation of the Book of Psalms is being praised for its literary beauty.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno11:17 Eliza Griswold on the Muslim-Christian Dividehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/10/15/october-15-2010-eliza-griswold-on-the-muslim-christian-divide/7273/
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KIM LAWTON, correspondent: There’s been a lot of theorizing about the conflict between Islam and Christianity—what some have called a “clash of civilizations.” Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold wanted to learn about the conflict for herself up close and personal by talking to real people in the midst of it all.

ELIZA GRISWOLD: I wanted to go to where the world is really breaking apart. I wanted to go see what happens when these two religions meet on the ground in villages, mega-slums, floods, droughts. I really feel that I’ve seen that the world is breaking down on tribal lines, and the greatest of those tribes is religion.

LAWTON: Griswold spent the past seven years reporting from what she considers perhaps the biggest faith-based fault line in the world—the tenth parallel, the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator in Africa and Asia.

GRISWOLD: These are very contested spaces traditionally, and religion has become grafted onto what makes them so contested today.

LAWTON: The area includes Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines—all places of bloody battles between Muslims and Christians. Griswold says geography, climate, wind patterns and human migration have led to clear lines of demarcation.

GRISWOLD: When we think of Islam we think of a billion people around the world. We don’t usually think that four out of five of those people live outside of the Middle East. They’re not Arabs. They live in Africa, and they live in Asia, and then you have about half of the world’s two billion Christians who also live in what we call these days the Global South.

LAWTON: Along the tenth parallel, both Christianity and Islam have been experiencing an explosive growth in numbers and religious fervor. Griswold wanted to examine whether fundamentalism necessarily leads to violence.

GRISWOLD: The belief that there is one and only one way to find God, and the understanding that that leads immediately to an enemy, because everybody else is wrong. That kind of binary division between us and them, the saved and the damned, I wondered if that was inherently violent because you were setting yourself against another person.

LAWTON: Griswold’s explorations were deeply influenced by her personal background. Her father, Frank Griswold, is an Episcopal bishop who from 1998 until 2006 was the top leader, the presiding bishop, of the US Episcopal Church.

GRISWOLD: I grew up with a lot of fear about what God’s will would mean. You know, after being a 12-year-old and watching my dad be consecrated as a bishop in the Episcopal Church, which involved lying face down on a cathedral floor with his arms out in a crucifix shape. That terrified me. If I submitted to God’s will, what would God ask me to do?

LAWTON: Griswold says her family encouraged wrestling over questions of faith and intellect.

GRISWOLD: How does the mind work in relation to God? How do all kinds of people believe in God? And how does intelligence apply to that? That notion very much is at the center of what sent me looking along the tenth parallel. So is the idea that people can believe in God absolutely without necessarily being dangerous or without necessarily there being a way to explain their faith away.

LAWTON: Her journey began in 2003 in Sudan, where nearly two million people had been killed in a civil war between the predominantly Muslim North and the predominantly Christian South. Two years before the war ended, Griswold traveled there to observe a meeting between evangelist Franklin Graham and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. She says Bashir was afraid the US would invade Sudan, while Graham wanted permission to do evangelism in the northern part of the country.

GRISWOLD: The trip itself was fascinating to me, because it was what happens when faith and foreign policy become interlinked. And it’s something we’d heard a lot about, certainly during the Bush administration, but both before, because this is a history that dates back to colonialism, and also still today there’s quite a strong religious lobby that works strongly in our foreign policy that we don’t always see.

LAWTON: You talk in your book about many people saying to you this isn’t really a conflict about religion; it’s a conflict about oil, or water, or politics, resources. How much is religion truly a factor in some of these conflicts?

GRISWOLD: It’s almost an impossible question to answer because I have found that each conflict is different. I never saw a conflict that we would see as religious that didn’t have some kind of secular or worldly trigger—whether that’s land, oil, water, even chocolate crops in Indonesia. Now does that mean that religion doesn’t come to bear on these conflicts? It’s more complicated than that.

LAWTON: Adding to the complexity, she says, are clashes within the religions.

GRISWOLD (speaking at bookstore): There is a very profound religious clash that we’re missing. It is not the clash between Christianity and Islam. It is the clash inside of religions. It is the question between Christians over who has the right to speak for God. Those same questions are going on inside Islam today, and yet we don’t hear very much about it.

LAWTON: Griswold saw religion being used to fuel violence, but she also saw it used as a force for reconciliation.

GRISWOLD: One of those places is in northern Nigeria, this town of Kaduna, where a pastor and an imam worked together to really transform one of the most violent fault lines along the tenth parallel into one of the most peaceful ones. How did they do that? Community building.

LAWTON: She says the pastor reminded her that events in the US and other parts of the West can have repercussions around the world.

GRISWOLD: He me told me this quote that I just find so relevant now, which is when the West sneezes Africa and Asia catch the cold. So what does that mean, really? Well, that means quite viscerally, for example, with the cartoon riots, the Danish cartoon riots several years ago, more people died in Nigeria than any other country around the world.

LAWTON: After seven years of talking to people on the front lines, Griswold says she didn’t discover any easy answers about the volatile mix of religion, politics, and violence.

GRISWOLD: What I probably took away is certainly empathy, but also—it’s a hard word to use because it comes with so much baggage—but a lot of humility, I guess. Because I didn’t feel myself in a place to intellectually judge people’s lives, although I began thinking—I didn’t even question that I would be able to sort of assess what people were up to by assessing their sociology, and in truth I couldn’t.

LAWTON: But she did come to see, as she writes in her book, that “religions, like the weather, link us to one another, whether we like it or not.”

I’m Kim Lawton in Washington.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/10/thumb02-griswold10thparalle.jpgA new book chronicles the people and places across Africa and Asia where Islam and Christianity meet and often clash.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/10/15/october-15-2010-eliza-griswold-on-the-muslim-christian-divide/7273/feed/7Africa,Asia,Bishop Frank Griswold,Christianity,Christians,Eliza Griswold,Faith,Foreign Policy,fundamentalism,Islam,Muslims,ReligionA new book chronicles the people and places across Africa and Asia where Islam and Christianity meet and often clash.A new book chronicles the people and places across Africa and Asia where Islam and Christianity meet and often clash.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno6:59 Tony Perkins and Russell Moore Extended Interviewshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/10/08/october-8-2010-tony-perkins-and-russell-moore-extended-interviews/7185/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/10/08/october-8-2010-tony-perkins-and-russell-moore-extended-interviews/7185/#commentsFri, 08 Oct 2010 21:32:13 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=7185More →

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Two religious conservatives offer their views on political involvement, Glenn Beck, evangelical Christianity, and more. Watch excerpts from Kim Lawton’s conversations with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and Rev. Russell Moore, dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: Tourism is big business in the Holy Land. Millions of Christians comes here for the chance to retrace the footsteps of Christ. Among their most sacred rituals is to be baptized in the Jordan River.

BRUCE STIBINSKI: Being baptized for the first time in the Jordan River, which is where Jesus was baptized, was just awesome. Words cannot explain how I felt.

SARA AUTUNES: I feel very freed. I feel at peace. My heart feels like it’s been opened up. I can’t put it into words.

GIFTY QUAINOO: No words to express why I feel very—I feel very happy and free, free.

DE SAM LAZARO: What few of these tourists know is that unlike their faith, the river itself is in very poor shape. The immersions take place in a two-mile stretch of the Jordan, about the only place now considered safe enough for human contact. For much of the rest of its 140-mile journey, the Jordan has been reduced to a trickle as it meanders through a region riven by war and tension. Gidon Bromberg is with the environmental group Friends of the Earth Middle East.

GIDON BROMBERG (Friends of the Earth Middle East): Due to the conflict, due to the competition between the parties, between Israel, Jordan, Syria, Israel grabs half the water and a little more than a quarter is grabbed by Syria. A a little bit under a quarter is taken by Jordan and the demise is that 98 percent of the historical flow of the Jordan today no longer flows. We’re left with something around 2 percent, and this is not fresh water. This is a mixture of sewerage water, agricultural runoff, saline water. What’s left is this very, very sad sight of a river that is holy to half of humanity.

DE SAM LAZARO:And one that no longer flows into another fabled body of water.

BROMBERG: The Dead Sea is dropping by three feet every year. That’s from my hip down.

DE SAM LAZARO: Only the ruins are left of a hotel veranda from where tourists use to stick their toes into the Dead Sea. Today the shoreline has receded more than a half s mile away. From their respective sides, Jordan and Israel further drain the Dead Sea as they mine it for potash, a valuable fertilizer.

BROMBERG: At the moment our governments are trying to do absolutely everything. We’re trying to maximize agriculture, we’re trying to maximize mineral extraction, and we’re trying to attract as many tourists as we can. Well, the two don’t—the three do not always correspond, do not neatly benefit each other.

DE SAM LAZARO: Israel is a mostly urban nation, but it also has developed a thriving farm sector, and even though it is efficient and recycles 70 percent of its water, agriculture is a huge consumer of water in one of the world’s driest places—one made even more so by several recent years of drought. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Lake Kinneret, the biblical Sea of Galilee, says environmentalist Bromberg.

BROMBERG: I should be completely under water. The Sea of Galilee behind us here should be five meters higher in depth.

DE SAM LAZARO: Even though it is much lower, the lake remains a major source of fresh water for Israel and also to preserve a pristine stretch of the lower river Jordan for the Christian pilgrims.

BROMBERG: In order to keep just a small stretch of some 3 kilometers of the Jordan healthy because of baptism that takes place here and because of needs of agriculture, the water authority has built a dam wall here, and it’s pumping water from the mouth of the river just for a few kilometers.

DE SAM LAZARO: Near the baptismal site, Bromberg’s group recently organized what it calls a “big jump” with Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian mayors and other officials, hoping to draw attention to the stresses on the historic river, a cause that they say transcends regional boundaries, even if those boundaries are at the heart of so much conflict.

NADER AL KHATEEB (Friends of the Earth Middle East): We know the Jordan River means a lot, not only for the region. It is for the whole world, for humanity. The Jordan is very important for the three religions. We know what does it mean for the Christianity, the baptism site, and it is a dream of every Christian to be baptized in healthy water, not in polluted water like its nowadays.

Officials standing in Jordan River: One, two, three—jump!

DE SAM LAZARO: Even as the big media splash brought hordes of reporters and cameras, the baptisms and the prayers of pilgrims went on undisturbed. Pastor Daniel Santos, who organizes regular trips for congregants of his church outside London, had not heard about the river’s pollution problems, and since this part is not affected he was unconcerned.

PASTOR DANIEL SANTOS: We’re not much in it and now because we came here for a spiritual purpose.

DE SAM LAZARO: So it doesn’t particularly bother you.

SANTOS: Yeah, because we also don’t take much time here.

DE SAM LAZARO: That comes as a relief to tourist operators here, worried that the publicity might drive away business. They point out that Israeli authorities regularly test the water to ensure it’s healthy. Gidon Bromberg says the publicity has led to the construction of sewage treatment plants in Israel and Jordan and greater awareness of the Jordan in parts of the river away from the tourist sites.

BROMBERG: We need to be striking a balance, a fair balance of sharing water amongst people—Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians—and a fairer balance of sharing waters between people and nature. And we’re going in that direction, but we’ve still got a long way to go.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2010/10/thumb01-jordanriver.jpgGidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East says the Jordan River, holy to half of humanity, has become a mixture of sewage water and agricultural runoff unsafe for the pilgrims who come to be baptized in it.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2010/10/08/october-8-2010-jordan-river-baptisms/7179/feed/4baptism,Christians,Environmentalism,Friends of the Earth Middle East,Gidon Bromberg,Holy Land,Israel,Jordan River,Pilgrimage,sacred,tourism,waterGidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East says the Jordan River, holy to half of humanity, has become a mixture of sewage water and agricultural runoff unsafe for the pilgrims who come to be baptized in it.Gidon Bromberg of Friends of the Earth Middle East says the Jordan River, holy to half of humanity, has become a mixture of sewage water and agricultural runoff unsafe for the pilgrims who come to be baptized in it.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno6:03